Dunamancy is a type of magic unique to the world of Exandria, the setting of Critical Role. At its core, dunamancy is magic that commands the power of potentiality and actuality. These concepts are to metaphysics and potential energy and kinetic energy are to real-life physics; dunamancy grants its practitioners power over things that could be. Dunamancers draw power from alternate timelines and unseen realities, subtly affect the flow of time, and even tighten or loosen the grip of gravity. This Spell Spotlight takes a close look at some of the most interesting dunamancy spells presented in Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.

Who Can Learn Dunamancy?

Chapter 4 of Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount contains 15 dunamancy spells, as well as two Arcane Traditions that have emerged among wizards who study the art of dunamancy: graviturgy and chronurgy. Graviturgists specialize in the primal power of gravity, and chronurgists manipulate the pace of reality itself. A third subclass, the Echo Knight, wields the power of dunamancy without casting spells by creating echoes of itself from alternate realities.

Some of the 15 spells in Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount are available only to graviturgists, while others are only available to chronurgists. Even though these spells are restricted to the wizard class (and then further restricted to certain subclasses), the book provides guidance on how the DM can allow other spellcasters can learn them. Take a look at the “Dunamancy for Non-Dunamancers” sidebar in chapter 4 of Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.

Spell Spotlights

Though we can’t cover all 15 spells presented in chapter 4 of this book, we will take a look at the most interesting—and the ones with the greatest potential for joy, sorrow, or confusion at the table. We’ll start with a humble dunamancy cantrip and work our way up to one of this book's two powerhouse 9th-level spells.

Sapping Sting

Sapping sting is a cantrip that, in terms of raw damage, seems a bit dodgy at first glance. However, dig a bit deeper and it reveals its true potential. Immediately comparable to vicious mockery, a cantrip which also deals 1d4 damage plus a debuff on a failed save, the real power of sapping sting is the ability to knock a creature prone as you sap strength from its limbs. With no limit on the size or power of the creature you can affect, even a mighty ancient red dragon could be forced to kneel if it fails this save. Being able to knock creatures prone is especially potent against dragons and other fliers because a flying creature that falls prone plummets to the ground. That could be a lot of falling damage if you sap strength from a flying dragon’s wings!

Of course, an ancient red dragon is “pretty good” at Constitution saves (read: it has a +16 bonus) so the odds of it failing that save aren’t in your favor. Still, use this spell cleverly and you might have a dragon burning one of its uses of Legendary Resistance on a cantrip. That feels good.

Magnify Gravity

Magnify gravity is a 1st-level area-of-effect spell that increases gravity in a small area, dealing moderate damage and halving the speed of creatures within that area. These effects are good on their own, but there’s another side effect that could be exploited through clever teamwork. Unattended items within that area require a successful Strength check to pick up. This makes this spell a great low-level way to prevent villains from picking up plot-relevant artifacts, enemy warriors from picking up disarmed weapons, and so on. Team up with your party’s Battle Master fighter to keep enemies empty-handed!

Pulse Wave

Pulse wave is a 3rd-level area-of-effect spell that damages enemies in a 30-foot-cone and either pushes them away from you or pulls them towards you. It’s one of the few evocation spells in the game with a cone-shaped area, and its ability to push or pull creatures in such a sizeable area is quite potent when paired with spells like moonbeam, Evard’s black tentacles, spirit guardians, or a powerful new dunamancy spell called dark star. All of these spells deal damage when a creature enters its area for the first time on a turn, so a coordinated party ping-pong enemies back and forth through dangerous areas using spells like pulse wave or eldritch blast (with the repelling blast invocation), or even the battering shield, a new magic item in chapter 6 of Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount.

This spell doesn’t discriminate between friend and foe. If you’re a sorcerer or an Evocation wizard and manage to gain access to this spell, Sculpt Spell or the Careful Spell metamagic will make using it a lot easier.

Notably, both the damage dealt AND the distance pushed or pulled scales with this spell when cast at higher levels. For instance, a 6th-level pulse wave can blast creatures a whopping 30 feet away!

Temporal Shunt

Temporal shunt is a 5th-level spell that allows you to momentarily shunt an attacking enemy into another point in time. This spell doesn’t just work on attackers, but on creatures casting spells, too! The attack automatically misses or the spell is spent with no effect, and the creature is banished to another time until the start of its next turn. This spell can be used as a high-level substitute for counterspell (and even boasts an impressive 120-foot range, compared to counterspell’s 60-foot range), and comes with the additional utility of being able to disrupt physical attackers and do light crowd control with its banishment-like effect.

This spell’s crowd control abilities scale at higher levels, too. Though the spell still triggers when an enemy attacks or casts a spell, you can target an additional creature for each slot level above 5th—as long as all of the targets are within 30 feet of one another.

Ultimately, temporal shunt isn’t quite as powerful as either counterspell or banishment on their own, but put together it becomes an incredibly efficient and stylish spell.

Tether Essence

Tether essence is a 7th-level spell that saw a LOT of discussion on social media right after the release of Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. It links two creatures together with a strand of fate for one hour, such that when one creature receives damage or is healed, the other creature is also damaged or healed for the same amount.

This spell is quite versatile, with three primary combinations that you can use in creative ways. These setups are ally to ally, enemy to enemy, and ally to enemy. Ally to ally is a simple and straightforward way of doubling your party’s healing output; it’s best used outside of combat because it could actually make your allies more vulnerable to attack while in combat. Enemy to enemy is a similarly straightforward method of doubling your party’s damage output. This can be used to turn your enemies’ greatest strengths against them, such as by tethering a high-AC low-hp speedster to a low-AC high-hp juggernaut. This route is risky, however—if either foe should succeed on their Constitution saving throw (typically a strong save for big, brutish foes), the spell has no effect. That’s a huge gamble to bet a 7th-level spell slot on.

The most interesting use of tether essence, however, has to be the ability to tether an enemy to an ally. By tethering the life force of your most powerful front-line fighter to the life of the enemy commander, every hit your tank takes also deals damage to the boss. This works especially well for subclasses like the Path of the Ancestral Warrior barbarian or the Oath of Redemption paladin, both in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, which have features that encourage enemies to attack them instead of their allies. Alternatively, tethering the life force of your frail wizard to that of a powerful enemy is a strong incentive for the enemy to avoid attacking an easy target.

Reality Break

This is where dunamancy spells start getting frightful. Reality break is an 8th-level spell that causes several different timelines and potential realities to converge at once upon a single creature. This spell is a powerful way to lock down a single creature while also inflicting heavy damage. Its potency is balanced somewhat by its random nature; you can’t choose to stun the creature every turn, but you could blind it or hurl it through space, which are powerful effects in their own right.

This spell’s effects are straightforward, but its concept is very much in the realm of weird fantasy, bordering on sci-fi with its mentions of wormholes and the dark void. If you’re a player or a DM that wants to engage in that weird flavor, here are some lines you can use to describe each of this spell’s effects:

Vision of the Far Realm. “Your vision swims and splits, as if you were seeing through ten thousand eyes at once. You begin to see something beyond—a sickening kaleidoscope of roiling shapes and colors. Caving under the assault, your mind goes numb.”

Rending Rift. “You feel your body split in two, like a paper doll torn straight down the middle. Your two halves flutter through time for what feels like a thousand years, and then you are suddenly whole again, and no time has passed at all.”

Wormhole. “A vortex of countless inky colors opens beneath you and swallows you whole. You travel at impossible speed, seeing this battle from a thousand different realities, then suddenly pop back into being and are hurled into the ground.”

Chill of the Dark Void. “The world freezes, and sound halts. Then still image before your eyes is stripped of its color, and you see the world as if it were a sketch on an artist’s page. Then the lines between forms is torn away, then light, then heat itself. Everything is stripped away until all that is left is darkness.”

Ravenous Void

Nothing escapes true darkness. Ravenous void is a 9th-level spell that essentially creates a black hole. It’s an incredible show of power, and any evil evoker will be hard-pressed to choose between this spell and meteor swarm as their most powerful spell. It’s hard to beat meteor swarm in the shock and awe department, but creating a black hole and sucks everything within 100 feet of it into its annihilating maw.

Not only do creatures have to escape the void by making a Strength check, they also have to be able to travel 100 feet away in order to prevent themselves from being sucked right back in at the start of their next turn. Dimension door could do it, but what about the rest of your party? A monk with a through-the-roof movement speed could even escape this spell's event horizon without casting a spell, but anyone without supersonic speed or the ability to teleport over 100 feet away is in serious trouble. This spell is best used in a confined dungeon environment, perhaps with an immensely tall ceiling. Since this spell has a staggering 1,000-foot range, a spider climbing wizard lurking on top of a vaulted ceiling or flying high above a canyon could cast this spell, feather fall to safety (as their concentration switches to ravenous void) and drift away, cackling as a black hole annihilates their foes. This spell becomes even more frightful when paired with clever use of effects that pull and push foes like pulse wave and gravity fissure (another dunamancy spell we didn’t have time to analyze in this spotlight), ravenous void is a party-annihilating spell perfect for omnicidal liches and other evil archmagi. Use with extreme caution.

Dunamancy in Your Campaign

There are still eight more dunamancy spells in Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount that we didn’t have room to explore in this Spell Spotlight. In some cases, this is because the spell is useful but quite straightforward, like the initiative-boosting gift of alacrity. In others, it’s because it has similarities to another spell we already covered on this list, like dark star compared to ravenous void. These spells do have notable differences, but a line has to be drawn somewhere.

The bottom line when it comes to dunamancy has to be: how will you use it? The art of dunamancy is a closely guarded secret in the world of Critical Role, and you could keep it as a rare and forgotten art in your campaign. Or, you could simply add these spells to the pool of spells available to all wizards, and ignore any distinction between dunamancy and the commonly known spells in the Player’s Handbook.  

My recommendation is to keep dunamancy a rare power in your campaign setting unless you have a good reason not to. Since they’re not a part of the spells available to players in the Player’s Handbook and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, most players won’t know about these spells at all! This makes them perfect rewards for spellcasters in the place of magic items, or as surprising powers for your monsters to wield against the players. Or both; perhaps defeating a monster infused with the power of dunamancy imparts those who defeat it with the ability to use those powers.

Getting Dunamancy a la Carte

Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount is an excellent campaign setting (though I’m biased; I helped write it). Nevertheless, if you’re only interested a few mechanic goodies within the book, you can get them piecemeal in the D&D Beyond Marketplace. This lets you buy individual dunamancy spells as you need them, or the individual subclasses of Graviturgist, Chronurgist, and Echo Knight, or even individual magic items if you just want to add just one to your treasure hoard.

As always, buying an item a la carte on D&D Beyond subtracts the price you paid from the whole book. So, if you spend $20 on individual spells, items, and subclasses, the rest of the book will only cost $10.

Which of these new spells are you most excited by? How will you use dunamancy in your home D&D campaign? Let us know in the comments!

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James Haeck is the lead writer for D&D Beyond, the co-author of Waterdeep: Dragon Heist, Baldur's Gate: Descent into Avernus, and the Critical Role Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, a member of the Guild Adepts, and a freelance writer for Wizards of the Coast, the D&D Adventurers League, and other RPG companies. He lives in Seattle, Washington with his fiancée Hannah and their animal companions Mei and Marzipan. You can find him wasting time on Twitter at @jamesjhaeck.